The day I arrived at Trout Point Lodge was ideal. A few sharp showers in the morning cleaned and cleared the air, then the sun broke through, bringing with it the fresh smells of damp earth and oxygen-flush air, and a light that was yellowy green as it filtered through the late-summer foliage high above.
I left my notebook and recorder at the lodge, and took a trail that meandered erratically to the northeast. The already muted sounds of the lodge faded within a few minutes – there are no mechanical noises anyway, there being no need for air “conditioning” in a place where the air is conditioned to a fare-thee-well by natural forces far older than man's technology. A hundred paces farther, I came across a young woman stretched out with a book, leaning against a balsam fir, but she was snoozing and didn't see me pass.
For another hour, I ambled on, saw no one else, heard no sign of humans and saw no sign of a “civilized” world. I saw chipmunks and red squirrels, bear scat but no bears, heard the me-me-me of finches and the cheeky calling of chickadees, saw a little nuthatch upside down on the bark of a spruce. Just that morning I had read that more than 200 bird species inhabit these forests, but I put it out of my mind, because I remembered something else I had been told, by a forest steward elsewhere in Nova Scotia. Just going out for a calming walk is good, he said, but with practice it can be better. As he put it, “You must try to move beyond listening and looking, into hearing and seeing; if you spend enough time in the woods you become outer-directed, and that's when the ills of stress begin to seep away.” That little nuthatch is not just one more creature to be counted and ticked off on a life list … it just is. So are the trees, and the air, and the light, and the calm.
The Japanese, who have been at this sort of thing a lot longer, call the experience of stress reduction in natural surroundings “forest bathing,” or shinrin-yoku. I read in a news report that “Japanese scientists have discovered that the scent of trees, the sound of brooks and the feel of sunshine … can have a calming effect …” It takes funded research to discover the glaringly obvious? True, there is further evidence that essential wood oils called phytoncides, which are natural preservatives and fungicides emitted by many plants, can actually increase natural killer cells in humans, thus enhancing the immune system. I don't know whether this is in any sense true, but it doesn't really matter, and if they want to call it “forest bathing” why should we quibble? It may be not so much that forests are healthy, but that cities are not.
You can “forest-bathe” pretty well anywhere there are trees, even in urban parks. But if you want to try the real thing, this may be the place. Trout Point Lodge's property abuts the thousand square kilometres of the Tobeatic wilderness area, which itself abuts the national park called Kejimkujik, the first and largest “dark zone” in Atlantic Canada and one of the least populated, least spoiled woodlands in eastern North America.
This is pristine Acadian forest; thousands of hectares of red spruce mixed with sugar maple and yellow birch, beech with their silky bark, red oak, pine and spruce, and hemlock on the lower stretches, some of them 30 metres or more tall. No roads, no houses, no industry … just nature. No all-terrain vehicles, no trucks. Not a golf course anywhere, not even a croquet pitch.
